Majestic Texas Longhorn

The Texas longhorn descends from Spanish cattle. Columbus brought cattle to Hispaniola in 1493, Spanish ranchers carried them into Mexico in the 1520s, and from there they spread north into Texas. Strays and abandoned herds went wild in the South Texas brush, and generations of fending for themselves made them tough, long-lived and resistant to disease. By the end of the Civil War there were millions of them.

Then the open range was fenced, and ranchers turned to heavier breeds like Herefords and Angus. By the 1920s the longhorn was close to gone. In 1927 Congress put up $3,000 to save it. Two Forest Service men, Will C. Barnes and John Hatton, covered some 5,000 miles, looked over more than 30,000 cattle, and brought about 30 true longhorns to the Wichita Mountains refuge in Oklahoma. In the 1930s the folklorist J. Frank Dobie, with oilman Sid Richardson paying, gathered another herd for Texas.

That was enough. The Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America formed in 1964, and registered longhorns now number in the hundreds of thousands.

This one stands square to the viewer, a speckled red-and-white animal with a broad face and horns that span nearly the full width of the canvas. Behind it more longhorns graze a flat, grassy plain under a high blue sky.